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Overview

As Adam M. McKeown demonstrates, the push for increased border control and identity documentation is the continuation of more than 150 years of globalization. Not only are modern passports and national borders inseparable from the rise of global mobility, but they are also tied to the emergence of individuals and nations as the primary sites of global power and identity.

McKeown's detailed history traces how, rather than being a legacy of "traditional" forms of sovereignty, practices of border control historically rose from attempts to control Asian migration around the Pacific in the 1880s. New policies to control mobility had to be justified in the context of contemporary liberal ideas of freedom and mobility, generating principles that are taken for granted today, such as the belief that migration control is a sovereign right of receiving nations and that it should occur at a country's borders.

McKeown shows how the enforcement of these border controls required migrants to be extracted from social networks of identity and reconstructed as isolated individuals within centralized filing systems. Methods for excluding Asians from full participation in the "family of civilized nations" are now the norm between all nations. These practices also helped institutionalize global cultural and economic divisions, such as East/West and First and Third World designations, which continue to shape our understanding.

Editorial Reviews

Journal of World History
- Kwee Hui Kian

In this book, McKeown demonstrates fully his broad readings and knowledge of works in this field.

Choice

An important new work in the field of transnational history and migration studies... Highly recommended.

Journal of World History

In this book, McKeown demonstrates fully his broad readings and knowledge of works in this field.

— Kwee Hui Kian

Donna Gabaccia

Here is a wise and provocative book for all who seek to understand why human migrants face increasing hostility, stricter restrictions, and intensifying border controls. Melancholy Order will be required reading for world historians of international migration, international law, and the impact of nationalism and racism on their intersection. Adam M. McKeown brilliantly synthesizes years of reading and research in archives on several continents, tracing the origins of today's debates to the erection of Chinese migration barriers by the liberal democracies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His analysis of the subsequent spread and expansion of restrictions provides a cautionary tale: there will be no easy answers to contemporary debates about migration.

John Torpey

Adam M. McKeown's provocative study clarifies how the regulation of migration was crucial to the development of modern conceptions of sovereignty and how Asian exclusion was the chief crucible from which relevant international identity documentation emerged in the late nineteenth century. Melancholy Order is a major contribution to a truly global understanding of the history of migration as well as a challenge to the typically ahistorical and Eurocentric conception of 'globalization.' Essential reading both for historians of migration and for those in the social sciences who want to make sense of what is (and isn't) really new in the contemporary period.

American Historical Review
- Madeline Yuan-Yin Hsu

An insightful and deeply engaged excavation of international methods of constraint and identification that have attained naturalized status today.

H-Soz-u-Kult
- Barbara Luthi

A highly important and invaluable contribution to the often US-centered perspectives concerning migration control and Chinese exclusion.

Journal of American History
- Evelyn Hu-DeHart

[A] well-documented and closely argued intervention in global history, full of remarkable insights.

Journal of Asian Studies
- Erika Lee

Required reading for any scholar who is interested in the history of migration control.

Choice

An important new work in the field of transnational history and migration studies... Highly recommended.

American Historical Review

An insightful and deeply engaged excavation of international methods of constraint and identification that have attained naturalized status today.

— Madeline Yuan-Yin Hsu

H-Soz-u-Kult

A highly important and invaluable contribution to the often US-centered perspectives concerning migration control and Chinese exclusion.

— Barbara Luthi

Journal of American History

[A] well-documented and closely argued intervention in global history, full of remarkable insights.

— Evelyn Hu-DeHart

Journal of Asian Studies

Required reading for any scholar who is interested in the history of migration control.

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

Adam M. McKeown is an associate professor of history at Columbia University, where he teaches the history of globalization, drugs in world history, and global migrations. His most recent book is Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936.

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